Modern day contact centers allow an agent to record one or more agent messages and then play the agent messages when a customer calls the contact center. For example, if the agent's name were John Doe, the agent may record an agent message that says “Hello, my name is John Doe. How may I assist you?” This allows the agent a moment to prepare to speak with the customer. The agent may record additional agent messages based on specific customers or specific telephone numbers.
Current contact center systems allow the agent to record and store the agent messages locally on a telephone. This works fine in situations where the same agent always uses the same telephone. However, problems arise if the agent uses a different telephone, which is common in many contact centers where agents may sit at any particular desk based on a first-come first-served order. To use a different telephone, the agent has to re-record the agent messages for each telephone that the agent uses. This is exacerbated in call centers where there are a lot of agents. The greater number of agent, the longer the delay. In addition, if a second agent uses the same telephone, the agent message that is played may be the agent message of another agent.
An alternative to this is to store the agent messages on a server in a network. This solution also has problems. For example, if the server goes down or is not accessible, the agent will not have access to the agent messages. In addition, because the agent messages are not stored locally, there may be a delay in receiving the agent messages from the server. This can result in lost customer satisfaction because the delay may cause a dead period where the customer is waiting to hear a response from the agent.
Current systems provide either high fidelity in which the agent must always use the same telephone. Alternatively current systems allow flexible seating, but at the cost of fidelity and the risk of delaying the start of playback. What is needed is a solution that provides high fidelity agent greetings without latency wherever the agent sits down to work.